I'm writing to you in my capacity as Program Committee Co-Chair for
the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics,
to be held in Hong Kong from October 1--8, 2000. As you may know, the ACL
conference is the premier international conference of note in the field
of computational linguistics and natural language processing; I am writing
to ask whether you would be willing to present a talk at the conference
as an invited speaker. Invited talks will be one hour long, including a
10 minute question-answer session.

We have not yet established on which day your talk would be scheduled;
should you accept this invitation, there is some flexibility we can use
to accommodate your own scheduling preferences (although it would be on
one of the main conference session days, Tuesday October 3 through Friday
October 6).

In appreciation of your agreement to provide an invited talk, ACL would
provide the cost of an economy class airfare from your home institution
to the conference, hotel accommodations during the conference, and free
registration to the conference.

I will be away for an extended period of time and will not be able to
read my email on a regular basis during this time. So please cc Professor
Martha Palmer, an area chair and member of the ACL-2000 program committee,
in your response. She has kindly agreed to coordinate the invited speaker
sessions during my absence.

I do very much hope that you will be able to accept this invitation.

Yours sincerely

***

PS. If you accept our invitation to give an invited talk at the conference,
you can choose to write a paper up to 8 pages long that will be included
in the conference proceedings. Along with the paper hard copy, we request
you provide a pdf file for inclusion in the CD-ROM version of the proceedings.
If you choose to write a paper, please provide the hardcopy and pdf file
by August 1st. Please visit the conference webpage (http://www.cs.ust.hk/acl2000)
and click on "Instructions for Authors" for specific details on the formatting
and submission of the camera-ready papers.

Regardless of whether you choose to provide a paper for the proceedings,
we request you to provide us a title and an abstract (up to 200 words)
by August 1st, 2000.

Author: K. Vijay-Shanker, 2000.

For AMTA-98

Dear ***,

It gives me great pleasure to ask if you would be
willing to appear on the panel named A Seal of Approval for MT Systems
at the forthcoming AMTA conference near Philadelphia at the end of October
this year.

The panel itself will last for 90 minutes on Friday,
October 30. The other panelists being invited are:

There are 9 panelists. If we each speak for 5 minutes
(two transparencies) then there will be plenty of time for audience discussion­and
this is a topic on which audience discussion is likely to be voluble!

While AMTA cannot afford to pay the travel expenses
of each invited panelist, it is pleased to waive your registration fee
for the conference.

You can find out all details about AMTA-98 from the
conference website at http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/AMTA98.html.
The program looks very interesting, and includes technical papers, system
demonstrations, exhibitions, three workshops, and seven tutorials. In addition,
there is a guided tour of interesting and historical aspects of Philadelphia
and a banquet in the impressive University of Pennsylvania buildings.

I do hope you can make time in your busy schedule
to attend the conference and share your ideas on this topic on the panel!

Please let me know whether you can make it as soon
as you can. Thanks!

Best wishes,

***

Author: Eduard Hovy, 1998.

For INLG workshop 98

Dear ***,

It is my great pleasure to invite you to appear on
a panel at the upcoming International Natural Language Generation conference
INLGW-98. This conference will be held in Niagara-on-the-Lake, near Niagara
Falls, in Ontario, Canada, on August 5-7, 1998. We are expecting a packed
room, containing some of the most prominent researchers in the field of
NLG, and are eager to end the conference with a panel that summarizes what
was new at the conference and points to the future.

The panel is called Reference Architecture for Generators.
The panelists are Prof. Chris Mellish (Edinburgh University), Prof. Donia
Scott (Brighton University), Dr. Robert Dale (Microsoft Research Institute,
Macquarie University), Dr. Stephan Busemann (DFKI, Germany), and myself.
Profs. Mellish and Scott will discuss their recently funded project on the Reference
Architecture for NL generators, representing the work in England. I will
describe the recently-funded effort in the US to establish a framework
in which various generators, including those built for speech dialogue
systems, can be compared, and outline the opportunities this new development
affords the NLG community as a whole. %The other two speakers will discuss
the work on creating %I hope you will be willing to discuss the work on
creating a reference architecture or a set of standards for NLG systems
as it is taking shape in Germany and Australia.

The panel will take place immediately before lunch
on Friday, August 7. Besides lunch, it is the last event on the programme.
Please take this into account in your travel plans.

Unfortunately, due to budget limitations, we are
not able to offer any kind of honorarium or reduced registration fee in
return for your appearance on the panel. My sincere regrets.

I do hope you will be able to act as a speaker on
the panel; your experience and comments will add an important dimension
to what is potentially a very important discussion for the field.

Sincerely,

***

Author: Eduard Hovy, 1998.

For Multilingual Information Management workshop,
1999

Dear MLIM panelist,

We are very excited about the forthcoming Multi-lingual
Information Management workshop in Granada, just after the LREC conference
and just before the EMNLP workshop. The workshop has been popular beyond
what we expected, and we are hoping to have a very interesting two days!

We have assembled the speaker program for the MLIM
workshop, and are very happy to offer you a chance to appear on a panel.
This is an important opportunity to be able to shape the way your field
is described in the eventual report, and thus to have an effect on future
developments.

Each session is organized as follows: two or more
speakers each present a review of the subfield, in brief 20-minute talks.
Then the panelists each have 5 minutes (not more, unfortunately!) to provide
additional perspectives, fleshing out what has been missed, and generally
ensuring coverage and completeness, with specific emphasis on multi-linguality.
This is your function.

The theme of your session is ***.

The speakers in your session are: ***

The other panelists on your panel are: ***

Your session is led by ***, the Moderator/Editor.
It is ***'s task to:

chair your session at the workshop;

collect all the materials from the presenters and panelists,
and from anyone in the audience who provides any;

create a chapter out of this material for the final
report.

In particular, we would very much appreciate it if you
could structure your thought along the following lines:

timeline of major problem(s) addressed, from inception
to near future

major bottlenecks and problems at present

major breakthroughs you see coming

role of multiple languages

juxtaposition of your subfield with other areas of Language
Processing

We hope that this is not difficult for you to prepare!
It should be a fun and interesting opportunity to reflect on where you
have been and where you are going. We sincerely hope that you are willing
to present here, and to assist the Editor in assembling the chapter.

Some general background, to help orient your thoughts:

As the various branches of Computational Linguistics
mature, and as natural language processing becomes crucial for the information
explosion, we now have the opportunity to draw together the branches into
a more closely integrated research field.

Already, some cross-linking has occurred. Methods
such as n-grams and the EM algorithm that were common in Speech Processing
a decade ago but almost unheard-of in the ACL community are now being used
freely there. Evaluation measures long employed in IR are being increasingly
applied in the ACL community.

But there is a lot more to learn from each other.
Speech processing can probably make good use of grammatical and discourse-level
knowledge; multimedia research can benefit from evaluation techniques;
IR is starting to look at machine translation.

To spell out what such integration might mean, and
to understand the challenges of the future, we ask you to delineate clearly
where we are coming from and where we are headed.